Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa?
Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now?
On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…
And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.
We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.
As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.
I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.
… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.
Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.
This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.
No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.
white people are racist by default (in the united states as well as other countries). are you white? congrats, you’re racist, and here’s the explanation:
you grew up in a racist society -> you were socialized to be racist thanks to racism being a dominant ideology -> you benefit from racism -> you’re racist no matter how much u think you’re not.
unlearning it is going to be a constant battle and u will never unlearn it fully. accept this. it is ingrained in you as a result of your upbringing and the media you’ve consumed. the sooner you come to terms with your own racism, the sooner u can better yourself. recognize the problem in yourself instead of setting yourself apart from those “other” white people.
I fux heavy with the White people who keep putting this post on my dash
This applies to all social structures by the way.
You’re a man? You grew up benefitting from sexism. You’re straight? You grew up with homophobic ideals. You’re cis? You grew up with transphobic ideals. You’re able bodied? You grew up with ableist tendencies.
The process of unlearning all of the ideology you were surrounded by is what activism is about. Do it.
And even if you’re not privileged under a given social structure, you might still have a lot of internalized things to unlearn
Our society teaches us to hate the oppressed, if an oppressed person says that what you believe or do is harmful and they tell you – don’t get offended, learn and do better
The important thing here is, nobody’s blaming you (the general “you”) for this. I think a big part of the reason people get so offended when they hear these attitudes is because it sounds like “you’re a horrible person and support these things”. That’s not what it means, and that’s not what you are.
But society feeds us a steady diet of memetic poison almost from the day we’re born, and for each blend of poison there are groups who are more or less immune, groups who are harmed in ways they don’t really notice and groups who suffer horribly from it. It’s not your fault that you’ve been fed poison, and nobody is blaming you for having been fed poison.
It’s just… the poison is there, and because you’ve been fed so much of it, it’s in your bloodstream and your lips and your head. And you might not notice it’s there if it’s not harming you or visibly harming others around you, and spread it without realising that’s what you’re doing.
That’s why it’s so important to recognise and identify harmful ideologies for what they are and learn about the harm they do, so you can start checking your first reaction and changing the ways you’ve been taught to act and think.
Most people don’t even use cursive for signatures. Eventually, they all just dissolve into squiggles.
Plus Some people’s cursive can be pretty unreadable even when they do put in the effort.
Oh noooooooo, society is chaaaaaaanging, what will we dooooooo~???
I was taught cursive, told I would need it in high school when we started writing essays.
Teachers didn’t accept anything in cursive. By the end of highschool teachers were not accepting hand-written essays and everything had to be typed. Though, they assured me cursive would probably be a thing in university because you have to write essays in class sometimes too and wouldn’t have access to computer to type it up.
In university, we were warned, that cursive can be a faster method of writing, but harder to make legible when writing quickly. We were warned if the professor couldn’t easily and quickly tell what we were saying, it would count as not having written anything. This included in-class exam essays on a time limit. So no one used cursive.
So while I was constantly being assured that cursive would be very useful when I grew up, it only became increasingly obsolete.
Why would we continue to teach obsolete skills? Why waste the time?
That being said… kids are exposed to a lot of different fonts… some of which are cursive. I think they can figure it out.
cursive is more of an art form than it is a way of life now a days and i appreciate the beauty of the script but its not practical unless you can do it really well and quickly for anything school related tbh.
when i did bank customer service i sure noticed an issue with checks being written in cursive and thus illegible, and the teller taking a guess at what it actually says. youd think ‘just go by the actual numbers’ but they had to go by the text, and often those numbers were also hard to read
One thing that is interesting is that if a young child has dyslexia, its easier for them to learn to write in cursive! It helps them keep from mixing up which way bs and ds go, because they’re written differently, and it helps because all the letters are connected, making it harder for them to lose track of where they are in a word. I taught at a school for kids with learning disabilities, so that’s what we did.
One of the benefits to teaching kids how to write in cursive is that you are also teaching them how to read it. Until relatively recently all official documents were written in cursive. If we as a generation forget how to write it, and therefore how to read it, we will lose part of our connection to our own past
This is going to make me sound like an Old Person, but I’m really fucking sad about all of this. I’m sad cursive is disappearing and I’m sad so many people seem to care so little about it. I realize you’re like this when you’re young, and I know you mostly outgrow it, but it makes me physically sick to hear this kind of ‘we’ll never need it’ reasoning. ‘What’s this for? When will we ever use it? Why does it matter?’ – that’s what you fucking hear when you try to teach poetry, when you make some comment about a historical figure, when you bring kids to a museum or the theatre. Lately, you even hear that about fucking watches? Apparently telling the time is now a useless skill, same as everything else, because smartphones have digital clocks so no one knows how normal clocks work anymore. Schools are actually removing them from classrooms because kids don’t know what to make of them. And, whatever, maybe it’s hilarious to some people and irrelevant for others, but it makes me really sad. Because the thing is, the world is way bigger than what you see right now and what you are right now. And maybe, yeah – maybe right this minute you don’t need analogical clocks and you don’t need Homer and you don’t need French, but why the fuck are you limiting your future self by not taking the slightest interest in any of those things? And how do you know they won’t actually change your life – not now and not in a month, but maybe ten, twenty years from now? Bloody how? I hate that capitalism is now so aggressive and pervasive and fucking seductive that it can force or convince kids to let go of their natural curiosity. I hate schools have become job training machines. I hate that twelve-year-olds look at something and give it an exact value ‘useful / useless’ based on an hypothetical future life they know nothing about. And cursive – cursive is the perfect representation of all this. Because everything that’s not about you is bound to be cursive – your parents’ love letters and your favourite author’s first manuscript and a beautiful illuminated book you’ll see in some famous library one day – so that’s a clean cut from history, from anyone who’s not your age or doesn’t live in your country (because this bullshit is mostly UK/US at the moment, but let’s wait and see). Cursive is a hostel employee on the other side of the world writing you an address to a restaurant she loves. Cursive is your grandmother’s hand on a Christmas card, and you know old people don’t say it all that often, but ‘Best wishes’ actually means ‘I love you very much’. And cursive also means writing fast, writing when you’re in a hurry, writing in a style that’s your own, writing on actual paper so you can doodle in the corners and add arrows and dates and the embroidered initials of your crush. And most of all, cursive is about thinking. Cursive is the cornerstone of critical thinking. Of summarizing, of making connections, of finding solutions. There are studies showing how different areas of the brain light up depending on how you’re writing – a laptop is not the same thing as writing by hand. Not even close. Taking pictures of the board or adding stunted comments to a Powerpoint presentation is not nearly the same thing as taking fast, accurate and personal notes on lined paper. It just isn’t, and that’s why rich people aren’t doing this bullshit at all. Did you know that? Expensive schools teach cursive. They teach Latin. They teach foreign languages. They teach poetry and theatre and debating skills and everything fucking else. So when they say cursive is not useful, what they mean is that it’s not useful to you. Why should kids know Yeats and advanced maths and how to read a fucking clock when your goal is to keep them on minimum wage doing repetitive, boring tasks until they drop dead on the spot because they can’t afford to cal an ambulance? Again, I heard rich people say this, admit it freely: it’s not that they don’t think Shakespeare is useful. They think it’s not useful to you. That value poetry adds to your life and soul? How it makes you think and dare and explore? Not. For. You. Ten years ago, they were trying to change university programs so they could be tailored by class and wealth; guess what: they succeeded. I did my second degree ten years after my first, and I was shocked by how everything had changed (had become worse: stupid, unimaginative, demanding in all the wrong ways). And school has changed with it. It starts in first grade, where more and more children are barely toilet trained and struggle to speak because their parents are too overworked and exhausted to look after them and teach them, and it goes all the way to high school – you see kids let down by adults every single day – bored out of their minds, scared, alone, anxious, taking meds and throwing up and obsessed with this binary code of death we have forced on them: “Do we need to know this? Will it be in the exam? Is it really useful?”. This whole thing – it sickens me. Guys – Jesus fuck, I don’t care how old you are – don’t listen to what they’re saying. Be curious. Learn stuff. Read weird books, give poetry a try, get to know obscure historical facts, start ten Duolingo courses at once. And write in cursive – with joy and laughter and rage – keep diaries and take notes and draw maps and marvel at the delicate, inherently human connection that’s between your hands and your brain. Seriously: we need to get rid of this system before it swallows us whole.
Repeating for emphasis since the wall is hard to read:
Why should kids know Yeats and advanced maths and how to read a fucking
clock when your goal is to keep them on minimum wage doing repetitive,
boring tasks until they drop dead on the spot because they can’t afford
to call an ambulance?
Again, I heard rich people say this, admit it
freely: it’s not that they don’t think Shakespeare is useful. They think
it’s not useful to you.
Also, I believe cursive has been proven to help the development of hand-eye coordination. That’s a weak little endorsement after the fascinating addition above, but still.
“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.” –Neil Gaiman
Sometimes I feel like a selfish, useless bitch for using my life to tell stories instead of majoring in mechanical engineering or challenging sexism and brutality in the police force. Then something like this comes along and remember that while I may just be telling stories, I’m also creating comfort for people who need it, and a war cry to rally around in times of need.
Stories are really important, but the people who make them sometimes forget that. So keep telling them how much their stories have meant to you. It will give them the strength to keep telling them.
It’s been said before but we really need to normalise the idea of not having been in a relationship / having sex / dating before your 20’s because it is literallyyyy so young and it absolutely doesn’t make anyone weird for not having had that experience before so I don’t understand why we get off shaming people for something so common
Hid art. Made graffiti, smuggled out kids, hid people, preserved knowledge, and kept the truth out of the lies
Not everyone is built to be a fighter. And that’s okay. A war isn’t won by the infantry alone. We need support in this trying time as the great beast called Facism rises. Don’t tolerate intolerance. Stay angry. Stay together. Stay smart.
Platonic love is real love and shouldnt be treated like less becuase it isnt romantic. Defining love as only romantic is a terrible concept. You should be able to love people in a platonic way as much as romantic way and not be seen as less
shealwaysreads 